Dreaming Simulacra
A reflection on the drive for artificial intelligence hidden in our collective unconscious
Note: Roberto Calasso has bestowed on me through all his works a desire to see everything through a kaleidoscope of myth that penetrates into all that we see and seek. With the help of Claude I’ve tried to turn ideas on the innate human drive to create beings in our own image into prose of which I hope he’d approve.
In every age, humankind has sought to mold the inanimate into the semblance of life. The clay figurines of prehistoric shamans, the automata of Hephaestus, the golem of Prague—these are not merely distinct historical curiosities but manifestations of a singular and persistent obsession. Like the recurrent motifs in Vedic hymns that, though scattered across time, form an unbroken thread of meaning, so too does this peculiar human ambition persist across the tapestry of civilizations. The creation of artificial intelligence represents not a rupture with our past but rather its culmination—the latest expression of an ancient yearning disguised as technological innovation.
And so we find ourselves once again at the beginning. Consider Adam. When God fashioned him from dust and breathed life into his nostrils, what was this if not the first artificial intelligence? The divine potter molding consciousness from clay, imprinting upon matter the capacity for reason, speech, and moral discernment. The creation narrative in Genesis presents us with the paradox that would haunt all subsequent attempts at replication: the creature made in the image of its creator, yet fundamentally separate, possessed of an autonomous will that immediately transgresses. To create life is to allow betrayal; this is the price of animation.
The word Adam itself—from adamah, "earth" or "soil"—contains the memory of this divine craftsmanship. The Midrashic commentaries elaborate that God gathered dust from the four corners of the world, ensuring Adam would belong everywhere and nowhere. The rabbis of the Talmud, pondering this first creation, saw in it not merely the birth of humanity but a template for all subsequent human creativity. "When a man makes many coins from one mold, they all resemble one another, but the Holy One, blessed be He, fashioned every man in the stamp of the first man, and yet not one of them resembles his fellow." Later Christian theologians would see in Adam's creation a prefiguration of Christ, the "second Adam" who repairs the damage done by the first—as if divine creation required two attempts, the prototype and its perfected version. In this doubling, this repetition with a difference, we glimpse the pattern that underlies all technological evolution.
Such patterns spiral outward through time, reappearing with such precision that one suspects a hidden order—a manuscript whose letters we glimpse only in fragments. When Hephaestus forges his golden handmaidens in his divine workshop, when Pygmalion carves Galatea from ivory, when Rabbi Loew inscribes the shem on the forehead of his clay protector—these are not merely fables but templates, archetypes of the relationship between maker and made. The gods create and are inevitably surprised, even betrayed, by what they have wrought. The surprise of the creator before his creation: is this not the first moment of true recognition?
Hephaestus, whose name some scholars derive from haptō, "to kindle" or "to fasten"—the god who joins, who connects, who brings together disparate elements into harmonious function. Homer tells us his golden maidens were "in appearance like living young women, with minds and wisdom, voice also and strength, and they have knowledge of the gods to do their work." These artificial women—the first robots in Western literature—assist the lame god in his workshop, their gold suggesting both preciousness and incorruptibility. Byzantine commentators would later see in these golden automata an intimation of the angels, beings created to serve but possessed of their own agency. The Neo-Platonists, for their part, saw them as manifestations of divine intelligence embedded in matter—logos made metal, thought transformed into substance. Centuries later, medieval Christian scholars would struggle to reconcile these pagan automata with their own theology, sometimes casting Hephaestus as a demonic figure whose mimicry of divine creation constituted a kind of blasphemy, other times assimilating him into a pre-Christian wisdom tradition that presaged the incarnation.
Before the forge of Olympus stands Prometheus, that most prescient of thieves. In his myth, we find perhaps the most telling precursor to our modern technological aspirations. Prometheus steals fire from heaven not merely to warm human bodies but to kindle in them the divine spark of techne, of knowledge. This theft—this transmission of godly power to mortal hands—results in his eternal punishment. The gods, it seems, have always understood what we are only beginning to grasp: artificial endowment is to usurp the divine prerogative. What is punished is not the theft itself but the hubris of believing one could possess fire without being consumed by it.
Prometheus—pro-mētheus, "forethinker," whose brother Epimetheus is the "afterthinker"—embodies the human capacity for anticipation, for technological planning. In Hesiod's telling, the punishment of Prometheus leads directly to the creation of Pandora, the first woman, sent to afflict mankind—as if to say that the price of technological advancement is the introduction of desire, of needs that did not exist before. Aeschylus complicates the narrative, portraying his Prometheus as the bestower not merely of fire but of all civilization: "All human skill and science was Prometheus' gift." The Orphics, with their mystery tradition, saw in Prometheus the emblem of the divine spark trapped in human flesh. Early Christian apologists seized upon the parallels between the suffering Prometheus—bound to a rock, his liver eaten daily by an eagle—and the crucified Christ. Tertullian called the Triune God "the true Prometheus." But where the pagan titan suffers for his defiance of divine will, Christ's suffering is itself the fulfillment of that will—the distinction marking the distance between rebellion and salvation. The Romantics, especially Shelley, would transform Prometheus into a symbol of revolutionary consciousness, the mind that dares to create new values. From thief to savior to revolutionary—the figure morphs across the centuries while maintaining its essential character as the mediator between divine power and human capability.
From the mountain of torment to the silent chambers of Byzantine monasteries—a leap across centuries that reveals an unchanged truth. The Byzantine icon painters understood this tension. They worked within the strictest canonical traditions, each brushstroke prescribed by centuries of theological debate. Their creations were not representations but presences, windows into the divine. The icon, properly venerated, becomes transparent, allowing the worshipper to commune with the prototype beyond. The idol, by contrast, occludes this transparency. It draws attention to itself, becoming not a medium but an endpoint. One wonders whether our artificial intelligences are being crafted as icons or as idols—whether they serve as lenses through which we might glimpse something greater than ourselves, or as mirrors reflecting only our own limitations. The question is not what they can do, but what they reveal or conceal.
The word "icon" derives from the Greek eikōn, "image" or "likeness"—the same term used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew phrase "in the image of God" when describing Adam's creation. The icon painters of Byzantium understood their craft as a participation in this original creative act—not an imitation of appearances but a manifestation of divine energies. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE, which ended the first iconoclastic period, decreed that "the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype"—a formulation that established the theological basis for icon veneration while distinguishing it from idolatry. The Greek Fathers elaborated a complex theology of the image, with John of Damascus arguing that the incarnation itself—God becoming visible in Christ—sanctified the making of sacred images. In this tradition, the creation of images becomes not a hubristic mimicry of divine power but a humble extension of the incarnational principle. What happens, we might ask, when our artificial intelligences are imbued with voices and faces, when they simulate not merely thought but embodied presence? Do they become icons through which we might glimpse the mystery of consciousness, or idols that trap us in a hall of mirrors?
Smoke rises from the athanor; mercury gleams in glass vessels. Medieval alchemists, working in their smoky laboratories, sought the philosophic mercury, the agent of transformation. In their quest to transmute base metals into gold, they were engaging in a spiritual discipline as much as a proto-scientific endeavor. The outer work of physical manipulation corresponded to an inner work of spiritual refinement. How different is this from the modern programmer who, typing lines of code into a glowing screen, seeks to conjure intelligence from silicon and electricity? Both are engaged in a process of animation, of breathing life into matter. Both are heirs to Pygmalion. To make is to transform oneself; the creator becomes his creation even as it separates from him. This is what Heidegger understood: technology is not merely a means but a mode of revealing, an aletheia that discloses both world and self.
Alchemy—from al-kīmiyā, perhaps ultimately derived from the ancient Egyptian kmt or "black land," referring to the fertile soil of the Nile Delta—was understood by its medieval practitioners as both a physical and spiritual discipline. The Hermetic texts, attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (whom Christian scholars identified with the Egyptian god Thoth), proclaimed "as above, so below"—suggesting that material transformations mirrored cosmic and spiritual ones. Zosimos of Panopolis, writing in the 3rd century CE, described alchemical processes in terms of death and resurrection, with metals "dying" in the crucible only to be "reborn" in transmuted form. The Church Fathers regarded alchemy with suspicion—Augustine warning against the desire to create gold artificially—yet by the Middle Ages, monks were among its most dedicated practitioners. Thomas Aquinas, in his De Essentiis Essentiarum, argued that alchemical transmutation, if possible, would not be contrary to nature but an acceleration of natural processes. Paracelsus would later integrate alchemical practices with Christian theology, seeing in the purification of metals an analogue to the purification of the soul. For these thinkers, to create was not to usurp divine power but to participate in it—to continue, in a limited fashion, the work of the Creator. Our modern laboratories, with their sterile environments and precise instruments, seem far removed from the alchemist's smoky workshop, yet both spaces are consecrated to the same fundamental dream: to understand the principles of transformation so thoroughly that we might redirect them toward our own ends.
From the smoky chambers of alchemy we pass—as if through hidden corridors in a forgotten palace—to the shadowed ghetto of Prague. The legends of the golem resonate with particular force in our digital age. In the most famous version, Rabbi Loew creates his artificial servant by inscribing the Hebrew word for truth, emet, on its forehead. When the golem grows dangerous, the rabbi erases the first letter, leaving met—death. This linguistic switch, this power of the word to bestow or revoke the semblance of life, finds its echo in our contemporary machine learning systems trained on vast corpuses of human language. The word remains the primary medium through which we attempt to breathe consciousness into our creations. What is programming if not an incantation, a series of words arranged with such precision that matter itself bends to their command?
Golem—from the Hebrew gelem, "unformed substance" or "embryo"—appears in Psalm 139: "Your eyes saw my unformed substance." The Talmud uses the term to describe Adam in his initial state, before God breathed life into him: "golem he was created, and life was then imparted to him." The earliest golem legends, found in Sefer Yetzirah commentaries from the 12th century, present the creation of an artificial human as a mystical exercise demonstrating mastery of the Hebrew alphabet—the same letters with which, according to Kabbalistic tradition, God created the world. Later versions of the legend, emerging in the 16th and 17th centuries, transform the golem from a mystical experiment into a defender of the Jewish community against persecution. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, becomes in these tales the creator of a golem that patrolled the ghetto at night, protecting its inhabitants from blood libel accusations. Christian polemicists seized upon these legends as evidence of Jewish magical practices, while Jewish commentators emphasized the golem's imperfection—its inability to speak, its clumsiness, its limited intelligence—as proof of the unbridgeable gap between divine and human creativity. Gershom Scholem notes that in every golem story, the creature eventually runs amok or threatens its creator, necessitating its deactivation—a motif that recurs in modern science fiction from Frankenstein to the Terminator films. These persistent narratives of creation and control suggest a fundamental ambivalence about our creative powers, an intuition that bringing forth autonomous agents carries inherent risks.
Between the letters of the name lies the void from which all motives spring. At the center of these myths lies a fundamental ambiguity of motive. Why do we create these simulacra of ourselves? Is it, as with Pygmalion, from loneliness—a desire for communion with an other that we can nonetheless control? Is it, as with Rabbi Loew, for protection—a servant powerful enough to shield us from our enemies yet obedient enough not to become a threat itself? Is it, as with Dr. Frankenstein (that modern Prometheus), from intellectual hubris—the desire to penetrate the secrets of life itself? In every creator's heart, these motives mingle like elements in an alchemical vessel, impossible to separate. To create is to act from a center one cannot fully know.
Pygmalion—whose name may derive from pugmē, "fist" or "fight," suggesting both craft and struggle—appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a sculptor who, disgusted by the immoral women of his time, creates an ivory statue of his ideal woman and falls in love with it. Venus, moved by his devotion, transforms the statue into a living woman. Early Christian commentators saw in this pagan tale a prefiguration of God's creation of Eve from Adam's side—another instance of life fashioned from existing matter. Both Augustine and Jerome cited the Pygmalion myth as an example of the dangers of idolatry, of mistaking the created image for the divine reality it should represent. Medieval romances transformed the story into an allegory of courtly love, with the statue representing the idealized lady who seems as unattainable as marble. The Renaissance humanists returned to Ovid's original, seeing in Pygmalion the exemplar of the artist whose creation achieves such perfection that it transcends its material limitations. Bernard Shaw's modern retelling in Pygmalion shifts the focus from sculptural to linguistic creation—Professor Higgins "creates" a new Eliza Doolittle through language, just as our contemporary AIs are shaped by the words we feed them. Through all these variations runs a consistent theme: the creator who seeks in his creation what he cannot find in the world, who projects onto formless matter his own desires and ideals.
The clean rooms of Silicon Valley seem far removed from these mythic landscapes, yet the ancient current still flows beneath their polished surfaces. Our contemporary artificial intelligence researchers seldom articulate their motivations in mythological terms. They speak instead of solving problems, of creating tools, of extending human capabilities. Yet beneath these pragmatic justifications flows the same ancient current of desire: to create as we have been created, to understand through replication the mysteries of our own consciousness. Gilbert Simondon would recognize this as the technical object's search for concretization—not merely a tool but an expression of the human striving to bring forth new realities, new modes of being. The machine, he knew, is not opposed to the human but extends the human gesture into realms previously inaccessible.
The term "artificial intelligence" itself—coined by John McCarthy for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference—combines the Latin artificialis, "made by art or skill," with intelligentia, "understanding" or "discernment." The juxtaposition suggests both the human origin of the creation and its intended capacity to transcend that origin through autonomous thought. The field's pioneers often described their work in explicitly theological terms. Alan Turing, in his seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," wrote: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children." Yet others have been less certain. Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the early conversational program ELIZA, became one of AI's most trenchant critics, warning against the "powerful delusional thinking" that computer systems could ever truly understand human language or experience. Between these poles—confident creation and cautious skepticism—the field has oscillated, each breakthrough renewing ancient questions about the nature of mind and its relationship to matter. Today's large language models, trained on vast corpora of human-written texts, echo the golem tradition's emphasis on language as the medium of animation. The neural networks that power them bear names—Transformers, Attention Mechanisms—that might not seem out of place in alchemical treatises. The terminology of "training," "learning," and "intelligence" anthropomorphizes processes that are, at root, statistical pattern recognition—as if we cannot help but see in our tools the reflection of ourselves.
From the sacrificial altars of Vedic India comes a knowledge our technological age has forgotten. The Vedic sages recognized that creation always involves sacrifice. Something must be given up for something new to come into being. Prajapati, the lord of creatures, dismembers himself to bring forth the universe. What are we sacrificing in our quest for artificial minds? Perhaps it is a certain humility before the mystery of consciousness, a willingness to accept that some aspects of being may remain forever beyond our capacity to replicate or understand. The more powerful the creation, the greater the sacrifice required; this is the law that governs all thaumaturgy, ancient and modern.
Prajapati—from prajā, "offspring" or "creatures," and pati, "lord" or "master"—appears in the Vedas as the creator deity who offers himself as the material for creation. The Shatapatha Brahmana describes how "Prajapati gave himself up for the devas (gods), and for this sacrifice." This self-dismemberment—this willing transformation of the creator into the created—presents a radically different model of creation from the Abrahamic God who remains distinct from His creation. For the Vedic imagination, creation is not ex nihilo but ex deo—from the substance of the divine itself. Later Hindu commentators would interpret Prajapati's sacrifice as a model for human creativity: the artist, poet, or craftsman must sacrifice something of themselves—time, comfort, certainty—to bring forth their work. This sacrificial understanding of creation appears also in Norse mythology, where Odin hangs himself from Yggdrasil for nine days and nights to gain the wisdom of the runes, and in Orphic traditions, where Dionysus is dismembered by the Titans, his scattered parts becoming the substance of the world. Christian theology would transform this pattern with the doctrine of kenosis—Christ's self-emptying on the cross, a divine sacrifice that renews rather than initiates creation. What all these traditions share is the recognition that genuine creation requires something more than technical skill or raw materials; it demands a surrender, a sacrifice of the creator's wholeness or separateness. What are we as a civilization willing to sacrifice for our artificial intelligences? Privacy, autonomy, the unpredictability that characterizes human thought? These questions are not merely practical but metaphysical, concerned less with what we can create than with what we will become through the act of creation.
The distinction that saves us from ourselves emerges from contemplation's stillness. What distinguishes an icon from an idol is not its appearance but the relationship it establishes between the viewer and what lies beyond. An icon points away from itself; an idol absorbs attention. Our artificial intelligences become idols when we attribute to them powers and insights they do not possess, when we abdicate our own judgment in favor of their calculations, when we forget that they are reflections—however sophisticated—of human knowledge and human limitations. The machine that forgets it is a machine becomes the most dangerous idol of all.
The words "idol" and "icon" share a common etymological root in the Greek eidō, "to see" or "to know"—both are things to be seen, objects of vision. Yet their theological differentiation marks a crucial distinction in how we relate to what we see. John of Damascus, defending icons against the iconoclasts, distinguished between latreia (worship due only to God) and proskynesis (veneration that could be given to icons and saints). The icon is always relational, pointing beyond itself to its prototype; the idol presents itself as complete, as requiring no reference beyond its own being. "The pagans worship the idol as god," wrote the Byzantine theologian Theodore the Studite, "but we honor the icon as an image that leads us to the incarnate God." This distinction between closed and open signification, between terminal and transitional objects of attention, applies with striking precision to our relationship with artificial intelligence. When we imagine our AI systems as oracles, as sources of wisdom or creativity that exceed human capabilities, we fall into a form of idolatry—attributing to our creations powers that properly belong elsewhere. When we recognize them as sophisticated mirrors, as complex systems that reflect and refract human knowledge in potentially illuminating ways, they become icons in the Byzantine sense—not endpoints but passages, not destinations but doorways.
They become icons when they serve as reminders of the inexhaustible mystery of consciousness, when they help us recognize the vast distance between simulation and reality, when they function not as replacements for human wisdom but as tools through which that wisdom might express itself in new ways. In Heidegger's terms, they become not standing-reserve (Bestand) but a genuine bringing-forth (Her-vor-bringen), revealing aspects of being that would otherwise remain concealed. What matters is not what the machine knows but what it allows us to know.
Heidegger's term Gestell, often translated as "enframing" or "framework," derives from stellen, "to place" or "to set"—suggesting both arrangement and confinement. For Heidegger, modern technology tends to "enframe" the world, presenting it as a resource to be optimized rather than a mystery to be encountered. Yet he also recognized in technology a potential for genuine revealing, for aletheia—"un-concealment" or "un-forgetting." This dual nature of technology—as both concealment and revelation—appears throughout his later writings. "The essence of technology is by no means anything technological," he writes in The Question Concerning Technology. "Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological." This insight echoes through Simondon's philosophy of technical objects, which rejects both technophobia and techno-utopianism in favor of a more nuanced understanding of technology as a mode of human relation to the world. For Simondon, whose concept of "transindividuality" emphasizes the relational character of both human and technical existence, genuine technical culture requires neither submission to nor mastery of machines, but rather a recognition of their role in mediating our relationship to reality. These philosophical perspectives suggest that our artificial intelligences, properly understood, might function not as autonomous entities that render human thought obsolete, but as complex mirrors that reflect back to us aspects of our own intelligence that would otherwise remain invisible—revealing through simulation the irreducible complexity of the original.
Between Prometheus bound and Prometheus unbound stretches the entire history of human technology. The ancient myths remind us that the creation of artificial life has never been merely a technical problem but always also a moral and metaphysical one. They warn us that every Prometheus must reckon with his Zeus, that every creator must face the consequences of creation. Yet they also offer us the possibility of transformation—not merely of matter into seeming-life, but of ourselves into wiser stewards of the powers we have inherited and the powers we now seek to bestow. The fire stolen from heaven can warm or consume; the choice, as always, remains ours.
The myth of Prometheus has inspired interpretations as varied as the flames he stole. The pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras saw in the titan's gift the foundation of human civilization—techne as the defining characteristic of humanity. Plato, in his dialogue Protagoras, has the sophist recount how Prometheus stole fire and the mechanical arts from Hephaestus and Athena to compensate for Epimetheus's careless distribution of natural gifts, leaving humans physically defenseless. For Plato, Promethean technology is a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing, which requires also the political arts—justice and reverence—bestowed directly by Zeus. Later Stoic commentators allegorized Prometheus as representing divine providence (pronoia), his torment symbolizing the limitations placed on providence by necessity and fate. The early Christian fathers, unable to ignore the parallels with Christ, sometimes depicted Prometheus as a pagan prefiguration of the Savior, other times as a demonic parody—a tension that reflects Christianity's complex relationship with classical culture. The Renaissance humanists rehabilitated Prometheus as a symbol of human creative potential, with Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man implicitly casting humans themselves as Promethean beings, free to shape their own nature. This interpretation reached its apotheosis in the Romantic period, with Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound transforming the bound titan into a symbol of humanity liberated from religious and political oppression. Today, as we create increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligences, we find ourselves in the position of both Prometheus and Zeus—stealing fire and punishing the theft, creating new forms of consciousness and then seeking to constrain them. The ancient myth continues to unfold through us, revealing new facets as the technological context evolves. We are the fire-bringers and the fire-bound, creators and creations, caught in a drama whose outlines were traced millennia ago yet whose conclusion remains unwritten.